Barack Obama – The Saturday Evening Posthttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com
Home of The Saturday Evening PostWed, 13 Dec 2017 22:30:24 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.4The Presidents and the Presshttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2013/05/25/history/post-perspective/president-and-press.html
Sat, 25 May 2013 12:00:06 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=86506In light of the recent seizure of AP journalists' phone records, we examine more than 100 years of Post articles that reflect the changing relationship between the White House and the media.

President Obama isn’t the first president to incur the wrath of America’s media. For most of his first term, he had a fairly good relationship with the press. If he was relentlessly attacked by some networks, he was given fairly friendly coverage from others. But all that goodwill flew out the window when the press learned that the Department of Justice had been trying to track down leaks of sensitive information by subpoenaing the phone records and emails of reporters.

As we look back at former presidents’ relations with the press, we realize how different it was in the days before our defense relied so heavily on secret intelligence.

Coming into the 20th century, newspapers were on fairly good terms with the president, according to reporter Herbert Corey. His 1932 Post article “The Presidents and the Press” explains that the media got their stories from a small handful of reporters selected by the chief executive.

President Theodore Roosevelt added a new feature to this arrangement. He would announce an impending action to a reporter on Sunday, knowing there would be little news in the Monday morning newspapers to compete for readers’ attention.

When the story appeared the next day, he watched the reactions from Congress, the press, and the public. If the response was too critical, Roosevelt would abandon the idea. And he would deny the story, leaving the friendly reporter alone to face the public.

President William Howard Taft came to the White House assuming that this pleasant arrangement would continue. His favorite reporter would arrive daily at the White House. Taft would chat with him and pass on whatever news he felt like sharing.

Soon other reporters were clamoring for the same access. Taft relented and invited in a select number for informal briefings. But when one of these newly admitted reporters published an “impertinently personal” story about Taft, the president was enraged. He petulantly canceled every appointment he had that day and refused to attend a state dinner in the evening. Eventually the first lady, Helen Herron Taft, pressured him into attending the dinner, but he arrived late. The story behind his late arrival was widely shared among Washington’s reporters, but none dared to print it for fear of causing another presidential outburst.

President Woodrow Wilson realized Taft’s methods of communicating with the press wouldn’t meet modern demands for more timely and more detailed news. He believed the American public wanted to know everything the president was doing. And so, one hundred years ago, he held the first press conference. At first, things went well; Wilson had already shown a talent for handling the press when he was governor of New Jersey. As president, he assumed reporters would appreciate his openness and would eagerly pass on his message to the public. He soon realized that they were straying from his points and was incensed when a reporter printed a personal story about his daughter. When he appeared before the correspondents, according to Corey, he said what many presidents have wanted to tell the press, “I am about to address you as Woodrow Wilson and not as the president. … This must stop. On the next offense I shall do what any other indignant father would do. I will punch the man who prints it in the nose.”

As seen in this Library of Congress photo, Calvin Coolidge enjoyed very pleasant meetings with the press—so pleasant that he held 520 press conferences in four years.

Wilson enjoyed generally enthusiastic support from the press as he sent American troops to fight in the First World War. But after the war, the newspapers were highly critical of Wilson’s Peace Treaty and his League of Nations, which would involve the United States in a global peacekeeping body. With many newspapers bitterly attacking what he felt was the only way of preventing future wars, Wilson lost his trust in the press. In 1919, he stopped holding press conferences.

By the time he left the White House, Wilson was so disillusioned with the press, according to Corey, he warned his successor, Warren G. Harding, “Be careful what you say to the press.”

But Harding was a newspaperman. He’d successfully run Ohio’s Marion Daily Star for 30 years. Corey reports that Harding said, “I know all about reporters. They will not throw me down.” Which, of course, they went and did.

“He had assumed they were friendly. Most of them were friendly to him, personally, but professionally they were cold as snakes,” writes Corey. In 1922, Harding made an uninformed remark about a naval treaty, implying that Japan was not covered by the mutual-protection agreement. “Instead of warning Mr. Harding, they printed the story. It was hardly on the streets before the Secretary of State was in the White House to offer his resignation.”

President Calvin Coolidge had an easier time than Harding, not because the press had suddenly become more respectful, but because he entered the White House during a time of peace and prosperity. The press was less inclined to dig into his remarks for an exposé. Also, ‘Silent Cal’ was not given to talking too freely; he made no embarrassing slips of the tongue that reporters could turn into news items.

The good times that prompted the press to take it easy with Coolidge ended seven months after his successor took office. The American press had sung the praises of President Herbert Hoover when he’d saved war-torn Belgium from starvation, and he’d been secretary of Commerce during the Coolidge prosperity. But when the economy collapsed and unemployment rose to 25 percent, the press became highly critical.

President Theodore Roosevelt at his Sagamore Hill home telling reporters what to say about him. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

President Franklin Roosevelt got better treatment from the press simply for not being Hoover. In time, however, the criticism grew, particularly when Roosevelt pushed hurried new legislation and—especially—when he proposed expanding the Supreme Court with a few, administration-friendly judges. Yet, even with all the hostility, the press never mentioned Roosevelt’s paralysis, or printed pictures of the president in his wheel chair. It was a courtesy never requested by the White House but extended nonetheless.

All the way up to the time of President Harry Truman, the press conferences had been off the record. If the president misspoke, he had the chance to offer a corrected quote. So when Truman told reporters in 1950, “I think the greatest asset that the Kremlin has is Senator [Joseph] McCarthy,” he worked with reporters to issue a more acceptable do-over: “The greatest asset that the Kremlin has is the partisan attempt in the Senate to sabotage the bipartisan foreign policy of the United States.”

Dwight Eisenhower was the first president to speak entirely on record in the press conferences. He was also the first to televise the event. In 1960, the press’s regard for the war-hero president changed after it learned the government had lied about the U-2 spy planes that had been flying over the Soviet Union. That scandal ushered in a new era of heightened suspicion and mistrust, which President John F. Kennedy inherited. A new spirit of adversity grew as the administration began launching covert operations. The Bay of Pigs, the attempts to assassinate Castro, and the introduction of American ‘advisors’ to Southeast Asia—all increased the skepticism and, at times, outright hostility of the media.

We’ve come a long way from the days when the White House could safely pass war news to the public because it was weeks, or months, old. Today’s conflicts are, more than ever before, wars of time-sensitive intelligence. We shouldn’t be surprised that there are conflicts between our government, whose job is the gathering of intelligence, and our press, whose job is to broadcast it.

But were the staggering costs always there? Is today’s medicine better than it was 50 or even 60 years ago? After reading our archival pieces below, we think you’ll be surprised by the similarities in past U.S. healthcare debates and our present-day healthcare concerns.

The 1953 murder of Thomas Lewis, president of a New York janitors’ union, led to the discovery that he was embezzling health-insurance funds from his union members. What happens to good people when the system gets hoodwinked?

]]>Fixing Our Healthcare Systemhttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2012/08/20/history/post-perspective/fixing-healthcare-system.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2012/08/20/history/post-perspective/fixing-healthcare-system.html#commentsWed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=67726We spend more money per patient than any other country, yet we are less healthy by far. How did our healthcare system become such a wreck? And what is to be done?

Just about every American can cite a personal example of the staggering benefits—and equally staggering costs—of today’s medicine. Here’s mine: My older brother Stephen was diagnosed more than 40 years ago with Crohn’s disease, a devastating chronic abdominal illness that had no cure and no good treatment. He was a teenager then, and he led an adult life of constant pain. He finally died of colon cancer at the age of 44 in 1996. Six years later, in 2002, I too was diagnosed with Crohn’s after worsening abdominal pain and bleeding left me bedridden. I had to be hospitalized for two weeks, but in the hospital I began treatment with a new cutting-edge biological drug called Remicade that had been introduced after Stephen died. Within months my symptoms were virtually gone, and I have been in robust health ever since. I was saved, miraculously, in a way my brother never could be.

Here’s the catch: There’s still no cure. I need a Remicade treatment every eight weeks. I learned when I left the hospital that it was going to cost more than $3,000 for the drug and $800 for the doctor’s services every time. Since then the price has risen to where the hospital at which I get treated puts in a claim for $22,000 and my insurer usually settles for around $11,000, or about $70,000 a year. To my immense good luck, I have a generous employer with a great insurance plan that makes it all affordable. But I only go through with it because it is truly a matter of life and death, and I have lived in fear of not having a job and being unable to buy insurance to cover such an absolute necessity, all because of some not-yet-understood flaw in my DNA.

When it was first proposed to the health insurance industry, comprehensive health insurance was greeted with predictions of doom.

Healthcare in America works for individuals like me—most of the time—but for our nation at large, the system is broken. As we near the last weeks of a bitter presidential election campaign, there are many differing views about why it is broken, what it will take to fix it, and whether the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA)—informally known as Obamacare—is the answer, but the fact of its brokenness is not in dispute. We spent more than $8,000 per person on healthcare per year in 2010, according to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, more than one and a half times as much as people in any other nation, and that amount has been rising faster than anywhere else. It is eight times what it was in 1980. Yet we don’t have better health as a result. Our life expectancy is lower than in any other advanced nation. And with about 50 million of us uninsured—also unique among first-world nations—horror stories abound. Any of these uninsured Americans would be devastated economically as well as physically by the disease I have—or by any other chronic disorder. And, indeed, more than half of all American personal bankruptcies are caused by healthcare costs. How did our healthcare system become such a wreck? And what is to be done?

A century ago, medicine was both very primitive and very inexpensive by today’s standards. When people became very ill, little could usually be done. They either got better or they didn’t; they lived or they died. We all have grandparents who succumbed quickly to heart disease or cancer or other illnesses but today would likely be kept alive and returned to health at very great expense—to go on to incur further high expenses the next time something goes wrong. Last month my father had bypass surgery at the age of 89. That would have been unimaginable a generation ago. A friend of mine just had a hip replacement at the age of 95.

American-style health insurance, which covers too few people too expensively, began as a strange byproduct of World War II economic sanctions, of all things. During the war the government froze the wages paid by employers, but it didn’t freeze fringe benefits. Companies that wanted to compete for employees did what they could to offer them something special—they began giving them health insurance. And so the system we all know, employer-backed insurance policies handled by private, profit-seeking insurance companies, arose, not from a plan but as an odd spin-off of wartime price controls.

People without medical insurance wait in long lines around the block to see doctors at a free medical clinic at the Sports Arena in Los Angeles in 2011.

By the 1960s, many working Americans had sufficient insurance through their employers, but the poor and the aged did not. That was why in 1965 President Lyndon Johnson pushed through the bill that created Medicare and Medicaid. Medicare was designed to cover the elderly and the disabled; Medicaid insured the poor. With them in place, most Americans had health insurance at last.

But the unending, growing stream of new technologies and new pharmaceuticals was setting the cost of medicine on an inexorable upward path. Health insurers, wanting to keep their costs down and profits up, started charging people different amounts for coverage, according to how risky they appeared to be, and avoiding the riskiest customers completely. That meant that the people who need insurance most have the hardest time getting it, and when people don’t have insurance they wind up going to emergency rooms more and incurring even higher costs. And, let’s be clear about this, these higher costs get shared among all the rest of us. Congress passed the HMO Act of 1973 to promote health maintenance organizations (HMOs) that could negotiate with doctors and hospitals to set lower prices. But HMOs had every reason to simply minimize treatment, and many of their customers came to feel they were being forced to accept second-rate care. The failed Clinton health reform plan of 1993 tried to fix that, but it was hopelessly complicated, devised in secret, and never even reached a vote in Congress. The next attempted solution was PPOs, or preferred provider organizations. They have generally meant more generous coverage for employees but even higher costs for employers, who have responded by raising their premiums and deductibles or even dropping insurance altogether. And so everyone’s costs have kept going up, and more Americans have become uninsured.

With costs going up everywhere, why do we in the U.S. pay more and get less than anyone in any other advanced nation? Because our accidental, improvised system pits doctors against insurers against patients. It is broken. Doctors earn the most when they do whatever costs the most, regardless of results. Insurance companies wage constant battles against doctors and hospitals to pay as little as possible of those unrestrained costs. And patients have little way of understanding what treatments they really need, what anything will cost, or what they can do about costs once they hit.

Ultimately the cause of this chaos is our belief that a free market is the best way to organize and regulate the system. We believe that if we can figure out how to create a smoothly working market for healthcare, just as we have for food and housing and automobiles, our problems will take care of themselves. But as was first explained in 1963 by Kenneth J. Arrow, a Stanford University economist who would later go on to win a Nobel Prize, that’s simply not possible.

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2012/08/20/history/post-perspective/fixing-healthcare-system.html/feed4The Post Produces a Presidenthttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2012/07/09/history/post-perspective/post-story-behind-president-obama.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2012/07/09/history/post-perspective/post-story-behind-president-obama.html#commentsMon, 09 Jul 2012 14:30:58 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=63416The 1958 article that is in part responsible for bringing President Barack Obama's father to the U.S.

We’ll try not to make too much about it, but the basic fact is undeniable:

A 1958 article from The Saturday Evening Post is responsible for President Barack Obama’s father coming to the United States. If it hadn’t been for this article, Obama’s father might never have come to this country; he certainly wouldn’t have met his American wife; and his son—our president—would never have been born.

What was so special about this magazine article?

Not so much on the face of it. It was a travel story about Hawaii. It began as just another assignment for Frank J. Taylor—one of 82 articles he wrote for the Post. His idea was to cover the 50th anniversary of the University of Hawaii, and get some vacation time in his beloved Hawaii.

As David Maraniss points out in his book Barack Obama: The Story (Simon and Schuster, 2012), Editor Ben Hibbs approved the story. “I think it will make a rather unusual education piece for us,” he told Taylor.

These coeds represented only a few of the Islands

“Colorful Campus of the Islands” appeared in the May 24, 1958, issue. [Read the full story here.] Over 5 million copies of the issue were printed. One of them found its way to Nairobi, Africa, where it landed in the library at the Kenya Adult Literacy Program.

Betty Mooney, who ran the library, read the article and passed it along to a Kenyan student, Barack Obama, the father of the man who would become the future president. She knew Obama was interested in studying in America, but was worried about racial unrest in the states. The University of Hawaii, as described by Taylor, seemed an ideal alternative.

From his first paragraph, Taylor emphasized the multicultural atmosphere the University nurtured. Following is an excerpt:

The physical setting itself is picturesque enough, but what really sets the University of Hawaii apart is the multi-racial make-up of its student body.

Physicist Walter Steiger lectures in an aloha shirt.

Because the undergraduates come from so many different racial strains, new students were for some years asked on the entrance blank to indicate their ethnic background—Polynesian (Hawaiian or otherwise), Caucasian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Filipino.

Every so often, however, a card would turn up on which a student had checked not one, but perhaps four or five of the races named. At first the registrar suspected undergraduate levity, but upon making cautious inquiry, he discovered it was nothing of the kind. Some students were indeed a blend of several races.

The university rose to the occasion. It added a new race, Cosmopolitan, and stopped keeping records of racial background.

Beach party at Waikiki. The hula is basic training for island-raised girls, and many of the coeds are experts.

The students, however, found the idea of a seventh race much too good to pass up, and the Cosmopolitan category is perpetuated in an annual … beauty contest staged by the editors of the student yearbook.

As the happy Hawaiians see it, only a campus insensible to the finer things of life would settle for a single beauty queen when there’s a perfectly good excuse to have seven of them in a row.

Accordingly, the … contest elects a separate queen for each of the seven different racial groups.

These campus-queen contests … on what is known locally as the Rainbow Campus, help point up the fact that the university’s 6,700 day students, plus 7,000 adults in night classes, in effect, bridge the Pacific racially.

The University had also been successful in building a diverse faculty.

Caption from 1958: "Few other campuses offer such exotic extracurricular activities as sailing off Diamond Head in February."

By creating what Doctor Wilson calls “an atmosphere of intellectual ferment,” they have been able to attract faculty members from ninety-nine mainland colleges and universities and from eight foreign lands.

Taylor conceded that many students from mainland America came to U of H expecting lightweight courses like “suntan and hula dancing.”

“You can spot them the first day, because they show up in the brightest clothing on the campus,” a university staffer explained. “But they soon find out they have to dig into the books to keep pace with the islanders and the Asiatics who are here to study.”

These latter students proved to be intent on their studies.

Students in the Sinclair library.

Indeed, the university’s students are such dedicated scholars that the faculty worries about them and conspires to divert them from book learning now and then.”In mainland colleges, you’re always putting the brakes on student exuberance,” explained Susan Daniels, the lively New Englander who supervises student activities. “Out here it’s just the opposite. It is such a cherished privilege to have an education that these young people have to be prodded into having fun.”

Obama, Sr., was duly impressed. A magazine article had pointed to a unique educational opportunity. He enrolled at the University of Hawaii in 1959. In 1960, he met Stanley Ann Dunham. They married in 1961. Their son, Barack Obama II, was born in Honolulu in 1961 and, 47 years later, was sworn in as the 44th president.

We’re all aware that the Post is an influential magazine. But sometimes the magnitude of its influence stuns even those of us who work here!

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2012/07/09/history/post-perspective/post-story-behind-president-obama.html/feed6Obama Wins Nobel for Peacehttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2009/10/10/history/post-perspective/obama-wins-nobel-peace-prize.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2009/10/10/history/post-perspective/obama-wins-nobel-peace-prize.html#commentsSat, 10 Oct 2009 13:00:54 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=12441For the third time in its history, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded its Peace Prize to an American president in office. What are your thoughts on the Peace Prize? Who would you have nominated for the award this year?

]]>For the third time in its history, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded its Peace Prize to an American president in office.

The committee chose President Obama from 205 candidates (172 individuals, 33 organizations) whose names had been submitted as part of the committee’s annual process.

The choice of Obama surprised most Americans, as well as the international reporters in Oslo, Norway, where the announcement was made.

Obama took office in January, only two weeks before the deadline for submitting nominees. In the short time that followed, it appears, the Nobel committee was impressed with his efforts to improve diplomacy and eliminate nuclear arsenals. They must have considered his efforts to build understanding between America and the Muslim world in a Cairo speech, and his United Nations speech urging greater global unity. They also would have known that this peace candidate was waging war in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The committee did not have to name a winner. Between 1901 and the present, the committee has refused the prize in 19 years.

President Theodore Roosevelt won the Peace Prize in 1906 for brokering a peace between Russia and Japan, which was threatening to destabilize Asia and possibly the Russian government.

Woodrow Wilson won the prize in 1919 for his efforts to end World War I and build a global League of Nations, which he believed would prohibit future wars.

In 2002 the committee gave its award to ex-president Jimmy Carter for his efforts, both in and out of office, to support peace and help struggling nations. And in 2007, former vice president Al Gore was the recipient for his international efforts on behalf of the environment.

The list of past winners is long and includes many now-obscure names. Many, though, should be familiar to us: Albert Schweitzer, George C. Marshall, Dag Hammarskjöld, Linus Pauling, Martin Luther King Jr., the International Red Cross, Anwar Al-Sadat, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Nelson Mandela.

But the Peace Prize doesn’t always come with a supply of peace. The choices in the past have been controversial. Many were angered when the committee gave the award to Henry Kissinger in 1973, and even more were disappointed that it was never given to Mahatma Ghandi.

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2009/10/10/history/post-perspective/obama-wins-nobel-peace-prize.html/feed16President Obama to Speak at NAACPhttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2009/07/11/history/post-perspective/president-obama-speaks-naacp.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2009/07/11/history/post-perspective/president-obama-speaks-naacp.html#commentsSat, 11 Jul 2009 13:00:47 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=8371President Obama will be in New York on July 16 speaking to a crowd of 10,000 people. While he has addressed much larger groups, rarely has he spoken on such a significant occasion: America’s first black president will be giving the keynote speech at the 100th birthday celebration of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

President Obama will be in New York on July 16 speaking to a crowd of 10,000 people. While he has addressed much larger groups, rarely has he spoken on such a significant occasion: America’s first black president will be giving the keynote speech at the 100th birthday celebration of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

The NAACP was formed in 1909 to address a rising opposition to civil rights. Racism in America was discarding its subtlety, coming out in the open, and making a new bid for power. Southern legislators had enacted new laws that made it difficult, if not impossible, for black Americans to vote. Racial tensions ignited race riots, and more were coming.

“To promote equality of rights and to eradicate caste or race prejudice among the citizens of the United States; to advance the interest of colored citizens; to secure for the impartial suffrage; and to increase their opportunities for securing justice in the court, education for the children, employment according to their ability and complete equality before law.”

The early years were daunting and Washington extended little sympathy for the cause. The NAACP addressed the need to end official segregation, promote black men to officers in the military, and oppose the rising enrollment in the Ku Klux Klan. The effort met consistent opposition from southern legislators who blocked federal legislation against lynching.

Halfway through its first century, the NAACP was confronting racism as virulent as ever. Black Americans were achieving some of their goals, but they were also being accused of seeking their rights too aggressively.

In the November 7, 1964, Post, Dr. Martin Luther King addressed this issue directly in his article, “Negroes Are Not Moving Too Fast.”

“Among many white Americans who have recently achieved middle-class status or regard themselves close to it, there is a prevailing belief that Negroes are moving too fast and that their speed imperils the security of whites. Those who feel this way refer to their own experience and conclude that while they waited long for their chance, the Negro is expecting special advantages from the government. It is true that many white Americans struggled to attain security. It is also a hard fact that none had the experience of Negroes. No one else endured chattel slavery on American soil. No one else suffered discrimination so intensely or so long as the Negroes. In one or two generations the conditions of life for white Americans altered radically. For Negroes, after three centuries, wretchedness and misery still afflict the majority.

“Anatole France once said, ‘The law, in its majestic equality, forbids all men to sleep under bridges—the rich as well as the poor.’ There could scarcely be a better statement of the dilemma of the Negro today. After a decade of bitter struggle, multiple laws have been enacted proclaiming his equality. He should feel exhilaration as his goal comes into sight. But the ordinary black man knows that Anatole France’s sardonic jest expresses a very bitter truth. Despite new laws, little has changed in his life in the ghettos. …

“Charges that Negroes are going ‘too fast’ are both cruel and dangerous. The Negro is not going nearly fast enough, and claims to the contrary only play into the hands of those who believe that violence is the only means by which the Negro will get anywhere. …

“A section of the white population, perceiving Negro pressure for change, misconstrues it as a demand for privileges rather than as a desperate quest for existence. The ensuing white backlash intimidates government officials who are already too timorous, and, when the crisis demands vigorous measures, a paralysis ensues. …

“Our nation has absorbed many minorities from all nations of the world. In the beginning of this century, in a single decade, almost nine million immigrants were drawn into our society. Many reforms were necessary—labor laws and social-welfare measures— to achieve this result. We accomplished these changes in the past because there was a will to do it, and because the nation became greater and stronger in the process. Our country has the need and capacity for further growth, and today there are enough Americans, Negro and white, with faith in the future, with compassion, and will to repeat the bright experience of our past.”

The NAACP has no reason to close operations this year. There is, alas, still more work ahead. However, we hope they, and the country, savor the moment when President Obama shares the podium with America’s first black secretary of state, Colin Powell, and our first black attorney general, Eric Holder. America should be very proud of this organization and the long dedication of its generations of members.